A bottle of whisky could break the record for the most valuable bottle ever sold when it appears at a Sotheby’s auction next month.
A bottle of The Macallan 1926 sold for £2.2 million in November 2023, breaking the previous record, with another bottle from the same series set to be solid in October at an auction in Scotland.
The sale of the whisky in 2023 made The Macallan 1926 the most valuable single bottle of wine or spirit ever sold at auction.
[See also: The world’s most expensive whiskies]
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The auction in October will take place at The Macallan estate in Speyside, north-east Scotland. The bottle’s estimated price has been put by Sotheby’s as between £1.7 million and £2.2 million.
After maturing for six decades, only 40 bottles of The Macallan 1926 were drawn from one oak cask in 1986, according to Sotheby’s. The cask – known as ‘cask 263’ – turned 100 years old in February this year.
Macallan commissioned artists to design labels for whiskies from the series, including Sir Peter Blake (who co-designed the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band) in the UK and Valerio Adami in Italy.
[See also: Whisky as art: inside the world of bottles sold as collectible masterpieces]
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Whisky’s desirability as luxury collectible items has continued to increase in recent years, with distilleries innovating how they sell rare whisky.
Spear’s has reported on the trend of whisky collectible artworks, such as Balmain’s creative director Olivier Rousteing design for Johnnie Walker of a Baccarat crystal and gold decanter – as well as William Grant & Sons 50-year-old Ladyburn whisky which featured abstract works by Korean contemporary artist Ha Chong-Hyun.
[See also: Will a 100-year-old whisky soon be on the menu?]
The luxury whisky market peaked during the Covid-19 pandemic, with a subsequent downturn in the prices that prime bottles and casks achieved at sale. According to Knight Frank’s Luxury Investment Index, whisky prices fell by 10.9 per cent during 2025.
However, Jonny Fowle, the global head of whisky at Sotheby’s, told Spear’s earlier this year: ‘We had huge price rises between about 2019 and 2022, and then we’ve seen a bit of a correction since then, but we have seen some green shoots of stabilisation and some more positive price increases recently, which is promising.’
